FW: Email messages: How large is too large?

[Robin Uyeshiro <robin_u at adtech-inc.com>]

Comment from a rookie:

Perhaps the IETF, eminent body that it is, could put out somethng that 
RECOMMENDs that email software vendors display the size of email 
attachments and maybe the time it would take to download on an analog 
modem?  Then at least the information is there to see.  Otherwise a user 
has no clue that a problem might exist.  I can't see that a software vendor 
would have any motivation to provide that information unless someone 
asked/told them to.

-----Original Message-----
From:	Michael H. Warfield [SMTP:mhw at wittsend.com]
Sent:	Thursday, December 16, 1999 12:21 PM
To:	J. Noel Chiappa
Cc:	ietf at ietf.org
Subject:	Re: Email messages: How large is too large?

On Thu, Dec 16, 1999 at 04:30:25PM -0500, J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > From:	Jon Knight <J.P.Knight at lboro.ac.uk>
>
>     > sending an email with a large Word attachment to all 15000 users on
>     > campus isn't a good idea as our mail servers will melt. ... 
especially
>     > from non-academic departments who are used to doing paper based 
mass
>     > mailings to students. ... depite us offering to put the Word 
document
>     > on a web page and then send a small email pointing at it

> This is an important distinction to make, between sending a large item to 
one
> person who know's it's coming (which I view as an acceptable way to 
transfer
> something from one person to another - but more on this below), and 
sending
> it to an entire mailing list, most of whom won't be interested in the 
item.
> Resources are far better used here by putting the item up for retrieval, 
so
> that only those who are interested in it expend the resources to get a 
copy.

The only problem with that is that the inDUHviduals who are at the heart of 
the problem are the very ones who will have no clue about what that 
distinction is.  Most of the time, they don't even realize they are sending 
a monsterous bloated blob.  One person I have in mind knocked her manager 
off mail by sending a monster to her entire department and his download 
then started timing out.  She later asked me "well, just how am I suppose 
to tell how big it is in the first place?"  One person told me that they 
didn't understand why they needed to learn how to something like "zip".  It 
wasn't important to their jobs so why should they have to learn it.
These are the people we are going to try and tell "you can send it to one 
person if they are expecting it but don't send it to a list" (what's a list 
- remember aliases) "and they're not".  That's only going to trade one 
brand of confusion for another.

	[...]

> 	Noel

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